This seems a bit early here on June 5th, but it never hurts to look back and see wonder about where you’ve been. Our presence here has been publicly visible since May of 2020. We began in 2017 with this free WP site? Remember?
I made this site in 2017 for Connected Learning as a way to share the work of the communities. We have done well keeping that alive and kicking. You can see those early Learning Communities at Bothell on that site under “Past LC’s” in the navigation. How nice.
Yesterday, I spoke to Jennifer Atkinson while visiting Julie Shayne’s class. Julie’s students were presenting the most recent Badass Womxn zine that they create in Pressbooks. Watching Julie in class is wonderful. It is no wonder her classes are so popular.
Secret cool side note. While students were presenting Julie mentioned that she had tried to print the first zine done years ago. I thought, well, in pressbooks you can export a pdf and I sure know what to do with one of those. So I asked the librarian sitting next to me to send me the thing as a pdf which she did. I went back to the office and sent it to lulu.com and a lovely color version of the book with be in my hands in 10 days. I’m gonna give the book to Julie.
Back to Jennifer. I asked her if she has been frequently updating her website and was she finding it useful and she said something to the effect of, “It has totally changed how I connect with people.” I thought, “Hmmmm, that seems like a message we need to hear more of in our learning community.” I told her we had all purchased our own domains back in the day and a bit about the “epiphanies” thing we have going. Then of course, I asked if she would be interested in talking about her site and the “why” behind it. She said she’d love to share that. So here we are. Planning and reflecting.
Here is a planning doc for the past three years and I added this year just now. Go ahead and add what you would like to see happen. I added Gardner Campbell as he said he would love to participate and Jennifier. I also added Ko without asking him… I would love to hear more about his use of Google sites, especially after my recent experiences using it for a “classroom.” I also kept the Glasgow collaboration on for November.
So, what did we do this past year? Well, in September we al chatted about the upcoming year and tried to plan it out. Near as I can tell, October was more focused on what the heck the whole Glasgow thing might look like. Remember? That was fun and we created something amazing.
In November we spend time with people from Scotland. That was nice and I am excited to see what happens this year.
In December, we had our very own Chris Wade share his experiences in making videos and his use of YouTube.
We had the wonderful Joe Murphy, the Director of the Center for Innovative Pedagogy at Kenyon College in January.
Coming to us from Ireland, we had Rob and Jenny O’Connor in February.
A wonderful Canadian and the Director of Teaching & Learning at Brock University, Giulia Forsythe visiting with us in March.
Our very own Dr. Julie Shayne shared her work around Pressbooks with us in April.
Then it was May, and we got a tour around the class Todd was responsible for done in Google Sites.
And now it is June…
So there you go. We have seen some things and here we are. Let’s go 25/26!